Cigarettes Less Popular than Marijuana, Teen Study Says: Why the Shift?
More teens are smoking marijuana, a new study shows (iStockphoto)
(CBS) Teens haven't stopped smoking - they've just put down the cigarette and picked up a joint.
That's according to a new study, which found that more high school seniors are smoking marijuana than tobacco. In 2010, 21.4 percent of seniors said they had toked pot within the past 30 days, while 19.2 percent said they had lit up cigarettes.
And marijuana wasn't the only drug that saw a jump in use, according to a written statement issued by the University of Michigan, which conducted the study. Teens' use of Ecstasy increased, apparently because of declining concerns over the dangers posed by the drug.
Why are more kids getting high?
One possibility is that teens may not view marijuana as a dangerous drug, according to the study's authors. "Fewer teens have shown disapproval of marijuana use over the past two or three years," the study stated.
But one bad behavior of teens actually went down: drinking. The level of alcohol use among high school seniors hit its lowest level since the annual study's 1975 inception, and the percentage of seniors who reported binge drinking - consuming five or more drinks in a row - dipped to its lowest level since 1999.
There was no significant increase in the number of teens using narcotics other than heroin, and heroin use increased only a small amount, but researchers said it's unclear if use is actually growing.
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Once the voters have the honest facts about drugs and drug policy, 80% support drug policy reform that implements the ONLY long term proven methods of effectively dealing with drug use and addiction - "HONEST DRUG EDUCATION AND RATIONAL LEGAL DRUG REGULATION". Look at tobacco. That's the ONLY real success in US history when it comes to significantly reducing drug related death, disease and drug use. According to Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, roughly half of all tobacco users have stopped using that often deadly and highly addictive drug in the last couple of decades. We didn't prohibit tobacco. We didn't have a war on tobacco users. This amazing feat was accomplished through HONEST DRUG EDUCATION AND RATIONALLY REGULATING THE LEGAL USE OF TOBACCO. The drug war has NOT reduced use of ANY illegal drug BY 50%, NOT A SINGLE ONE!
The alleged goals of the drug war are to reduce drug related death, disease, crime and drug use. It has accomplished NONE of those goals after almost 100 years of prohibition policy, over 1 trillion tax dollars wasted, ever tougher criminal penalties, arresting millions of Americans, removing an ever increasing list of Constitutional rights and all the other irrational effort and wasted resources that have been put into this failed harmful unproductive policy.
We have laws on the books that are causing a nonviolent US citizen to be arrested every 17 seconds on drug charges. Many of those laws have been in effect for almost 100 years and the goals of those laws are not being accomplished AT ALL. It's time for the voters and our elected representatives to say enough is enough and support long term proven methods of dealing with drug use and addiction in an effective rational manner rather than continuing to feed the destructive, harmful, wasteful, unproductive, drug war white elephant.
The drug war is a real war and it is an unnecessarily harmful, completely unwinnable and wasteful war. It is in fact a war against a certain large percentage of our own population that chooses to different degrees and with a wide range or results, to put a wide variety of different substances in their own bodies and for a wide variety of reasons.
DRUG WAR VIOLENCE escalated long ago BECAUSE OF OUR GOVERNMENT DECLARING "WAR" instead of implementing readily available, far less dangerous, far less harmful and far less expensive drug and addiction policy. All these negatives needlessly continue to get more and more violent and harmful at the expense of "We The People" and our Constitutional rights and liberties. This "drug war", is ROUTINELY being fought in our communities with machine guns, teargas, dogs and virtually every other tool of war available. Flash/bang grenades are more and more often, thrown through the windows of private homes, often with children inside, by federal, state and local law enforcement who are sworn to, "uphold the Constitution, protect and serve". Most of this military equipment and tactics are completely unnecessary and has no business being used to serve a simple search warrant on a nonviolent citizen's home. Many times all it takes to trigger law enforcement use of these unnecessary tactics is for a citizen to be known, (or thought to be known) to own a legal firearm. Many of such military styled raids, carried out often in the middle of the night, needlessly result in harm and even death for law enforcement, innocent bystanders, citizens that are the victims of wrong addresses and bad information, nonviolent citizens and a host of others. These unconstitutional and mostly unnecessary paramilitary raids are outraging a larger and larger percentage of our citizens. Unless a peaceful alternative to the drug war is found rapidly, we almost certainly will soon see DRUG PROHIBITION RELATED VIOLENCE in our communities on a similar scale to what is being experienced right now in Mexico.
The report documents that nationwide there has been a statistically significant reduction in drugged driving from 2002 to 2009.
The report names 7 States as sharing in the statistically significant reduction of drugged driving. 4 of the 7 states have medical cannabis laws and include California, Alaska, Hawaii, and Michigan. Michigan has only been a medical cannabis state for 2 years of the 3 which were averaged to calculate the decline. Not only didn't drugged driving "skyrocket" in Michigan, it was reduced by a "statistically significant" percentage according to the governments licensed producer of drug war fiction.
Where is the mayhem and carnage that the Know Nothings swear is inevitable because of medical cannabis? Where is the "skyrocketing" incidence of drugged driving?
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<blockquote> When combined 2002 to 2005 data are compared with combined 2006 to 2009 data, the Nation as a whole experienced a statistically significant reduction in the rate of past year drugged driving (from 4.8 to 4.3 percent), as did seven States: <b> Alaska, California</b>, Florida, <b>Hawaii</b>, Iowa, <b>Michigan</b>, and Pennsylvania (Table 2). No States had a statistically significant increase in the rate of drugged driving.
http://oas.samhsa.gov/2k10/205/DruggedDriving.htm </blockquote>
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So really, I'd like to know, why the heck weren't considered newsworthy? I wonder if some day the ignorati will wake up and see that the very authorities that they swear allegiance to are spinning fiction from whole cloth and bald faced lying. These authorities do not deserve a single lick of respect or public trust. At some point it has to become obvious to even the thickest mind that the authorities are playing them for fools. Politicians with a political agenda deserve no credibility whatsoever.
Listen to these high ranking narcotics officers expose the harms and waste of the drug war. Learn the truth about the drug war. It is a FAILED HARMFUL UNCONSTITUTIONAL UNLAWFUL VIOLENT WAR AGAINST NONVIOLENT CITIZENS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LayaGk0TMDc
The World Health Organization Documents Failure of U.S. Drug Policies http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/90295/
Cannabis Reduces Infant Mortality: http://www.salem-news.com/articles/june272010/marijuana-infants-sc.php This is a great example of the information the drug war prohibitionists suppress every way they can. If babies are getting natural cannabis like substances in mother's breast milk, do you still believe marijuana is harmful at any age?
Anyone that wants marijuana is already getting it. Legalizing and rationally regulating marijuana is not adding another harmful intoxicant to society, legalizing gives people the legal opportunity to make the SAFER CHOICE! Alcohol, tobacco, many Rx drugs, many over the counter drugs, even caffeine, aspirin and non-aspirin, can all be deadly and are well documented as being the direct cause of hundreds of thousands of deaths in the USA every year! http://www.saferchoice.org/content/view/24/53/
No one, of any age, in all of recorded history, anywhere on planet earth, has ever died from the ingredients in marijuana and they never will, marijuana is nontoxic. Many have died from marijuana prohibition and tens of millions have been jailed or otherwise harmed. In the US we arrest someone on marijuana charges every 38 seconds. Marijuana charges account for roughly 50% of all drug arrests. Would you rather have your kid locked up with killers and child molesters or would you prefer to do your own proper parenting?
The laws prohibiting marijuana are NOT a result of any harm from marijuana. They are the result of racism, lies and greed. Read the well documented proof of that and a lot more marijuana TRUTH in these two articles: "WHY IS MARIJUANA ILLEGAL, Pete Guither" and "MARIJUANA AND HEMP THE UNTOLD STORY, Thomas J. Bouril", click the links to those articles on this webpage:
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